Rob Couhig aiming to utilise Reading location for 'exciting' stadium plans
Couhig finally completed his long-awaited takeover on Wednesday, having originally tried to purchase the club back in August 2024.
Keen to increase the club's revenue streams, the new Royals chief believes that the club can become good partners with the IT community, the Thames Valley famously dubbed the UK's Silicon Valley.
READ MORE: Reading FC new chief feeling good' ahead of summer of change
Supporters are keen to see the squad progress on the field, but have been calling for improvements to the stadium for months, the much-loved home of the club since 1998 beginning to show its age during Dai Yongge's miserable reign.
"I'm glad you brought up the stadium," Couhig said to the media on Wednesday. "There' will be some things happening over the next three months with the stadium that I think will be very, very much exciting to the fans, very much part of how we see ourselves getting fixated into the future. The world is changing, whether we want it to or not. We're not going to go back to the great halcyon days of Reading 25 to 30 years ago, we want the best days of Reading being in the next five or 10 years, because after that what can you do?
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"One of the attractions about Reading is where it's situated, right there in the hub of the IT community. Expanding out from there, we expect to become great partners of that industry and utilise it, and it utilise us, to really put Reading on the map worldwide."
Taking over with the club in the third tier for a third season, Noel Hunt's side missed out on a play-off place by just three points with a final day defeat to Barnsley.
Speaking on aims, both long-term and short-term, the former Wycombe Wanderers chief does not think it will take long to get the club back into the Championship.
"Let me explain the Couhig Philosophy on this. It's hard for most people to recognise- it would have been impossible for me to recognise when I was 45 and I was a young hard charger. We buy this thing, and we recognise it has a necessary shelf life under our care and custody.
"Part of what we want to do is to make sure that when our time comes, it is easily sellable and it's much more valuable than the day we bought it. The way you do that is you put necessary resources into it to make it better in every way. It's about, for me, making it better so when the next guy or girl comes along, they say 'wow, this is really a gem, and I would love to be able to be associated with it and put my time and energy into it.'
READ MORE: Reading FC chief on state of play with contract extensions
"If you look at what we did with something as pedestrian as our pest control company that we built in Louisiana, the baseball team we had here, the Wycombe team we had, in every instance in our other businesses we found people who were, in my mind, going to be as good or better stewards than we are of the business, but either came in because they were younger or they had more wealth, or they had a different vision, they could grow the club."
"I think it can be there [the Premier League]," he added. "I don't want to blithely say, of course, that's where it belongs until we've gotten a little bit better sense of what it can afford. Some of those clubs that are now permanent or semi-permanent members of the Premier League, in the sense that they have been up there for a while, and this thing and Brentford for example, they've done it differently than most.
READ MORE: Reading FC owner addresses rumours of Academy cuts
"I think the way we get back there is to recognise our strengths and our weaknesses and be prepared to do it a little bit differently, but all of this is not a day one plan. All of this is over the next three to five months. Do I believe we can successfully compete at the Championship level in very short order? Yes. Where we go from there, we'll have to see."
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